Garage Rock’s Latest Nerve Center

FULLERTON, Calif. — Eleven a.m. on a Tuesday: time for business to begin at Burger Records, if it ever really ends. The nerve center of fourth-wave garage rock — a record label and a store — is in a small, square space, slotted along with a vaping emporium and a tattoo parlor in a strip mall along a four-lane artery, near industrial parks, a food-service-equipment manufacturing plant and the Anaheim town line. It’s Orange County industrial suburbia, where most of what is visible — parking lots, buildings, grass allotments, signage, Dumpsters — has been city-planned into rectangles.

Inside is much more rolling and random, a place where someone might have had fun last night, and the night before: mint-green walls, gig fliers, records everywhere, toys and stuffed animals, a few turntables and a cat and a battered couch. There’s a shy employee by the cash register who calls herself Burger Patty. The tattoos on her fingers spell out Memories, four letters on each hand. (It’s the name of a Burger band, originally from Portland, now based in Los Angeles.)

The proprietors, Lee Rickard, 30, and Sean Bohrman, 32, are starting their day behind a door in the back, in a warren of VHS tapes and cassettes. Mr. Rickard is tall, thin and manic, an energy source and idea man, with Peter Frampton hair. Mr. Bohrman is smaller and softer and steadier, a meticulous bookkeeper. Mr. Rickard just arose from the couch. It’s his bed. The shower, sort of, is an industrial spigot in the back alley. They both live here.

The store here started in 2009; the record label, now run out of the back, two years before. Burger headquarters is a round-the-clock freak lab and extended promotional happening, building a cultural movement from tiny resources. The word is spreading. Burger, at this moment, in its way, gives you a sense of SST in Los Angeles or Dischord in Washington: a label as a culture, and a regional attitude, from which its artists are nearly indivisible.

Much in Burger-world — the guys at the top; hasty and cheery music itself (pop, punk, space-rock, or whatever specific mood it assumes); the energetic, weekly video episodes of music and stoned silliness at the BRGRTV YouTube channel created by the local 20-year olds Jack Sample and Steele O’Neal — appears to be exactly half-serious. Rikky Gage, under his solo project Free Weed, composed BRGRTV’s perfect, 40-second theme song. One of its two stanzas is:

What makes all the boppers drool?What makes the ladies think you’re cool?What makes you baddest dude in school?Must be Burger TV.

“Burger is the most important label to me in the world right now,” Mr. Gage told me recently. His opinion bears repeating, not only because it is sweeping, in the Burger mode, but also because he’s in three Burger-related bands — the Memories is one — and runs his own cassette label, Gnar Tapes. Burger has not yet turned a profit, but produces at an amazing rate: 300 releases last year, between new original material on vinyl and CD and many, many cassette releases and reissues in runs of 300 to 2,000.

Some of Burger’s bands are negligible, and only make sense in the aggregate. (Mr. Bohrman retweets pictures taken by his customers of their purchased stacks of new Burger releases; the stacks seem as significant as the individual items.) Some of them are very good, or on the way there. Many of Burger’s recordings have been made in the same few studios, with the same few engineers; there’s a unity of design for the cover art, with hand-drawn doodles and tropical-punch colors.

Among the Burger artists making moves are Cherry Glazerr, a band led by the 17-year-old singer-songwriter Clementine Creevy; Curtis Harding, a kind of garage-soul singer who used to work with CeeLo; the Garden, a duo of the 19-year-old identical twins Fletcher and Wyatt Shears, curious and severe young men who like to wear women’s pants and run a side hustle as Yves Saint Laurent models; the Cosmonauts, Gap Dream and Audacity, all from Fullerton; and Together Pangea, who were recently signed by Harvest, a subsidiary of Capitol.

The day I visited the store in mid-April, Cherry Glazerr, the Garden and Together Pangea had all been asked by the label to drop by, and the scene quickly resembled a party: beer, weed, laughter, kissing. They’re all friends, loyal to one another and the label; many of the bands have pitched in to help with errands and shop work. Two of the guys from Together Pangea have Audacity tattoos. Pangea and the Garden had played a gig together at the Troubadour, in Los Angeles, a few nights before.

The Cherry Glazerr kids apologized for not being able to talk about being in talks with other labels — a situation with which Mr. Rickard and Mr. Bohrman seem cool — but were clear that they owed a lot of their forward motion to Burger. Two years ago, Mr. Bohrman found Ms. Creevy’s solo recordings on Soundcloud (as Clembutt). Within months, the band formed, and Burger put out its first tape; then Burger promoted its first gig at a skate park. A little more than a year later, the group was playing to 5,000 people at Burgerama, the label’s annual festival, in nearby Santa Ana; attendance tripled from 2013 and 2014.

What was that about fourth-wave garage rock? It’s not a thing; there’s little acknowledgment or self-consciousness about that idea among Burger or its bands. But the Burger aesthetic is cheap, messy, in praise of kicks and deep feelings rendered clumsily: three-chord guitar songs through trebly, reverb-ed amps about girlfriends, boyfriends, food, intoxicants, crushes, sex, breaking up, other bands. Those are the common denominators that relate Burger’s music to a past tradition in rock ’n’ roll. It’s all pretty straightforward, and pretty sunny minded. Cherry Glazerr’s song “Grilled Cheese” is about exactly that. Its song “Bloody Band-Aid” is about falling in love and being rebuffed, but in floppier, realer terms:

I had a crush on youAnd now I have this weird bloody Band-AidAnd I’ve got the pin that your band madeAnd I feel weird.

The first wave of garage rock was in the mid-’60s: the Seeds, ? and the Mysterians and so on. The second, conscious of its precedent and in thrall to “Nuggets,” the garage-rock compilation-LP series, happened in the late ’70s and ’80s: the Cramps, the Lyres, the Chesterfield Kings. The third came in the late ’80s and ’90s, looser and cruder and punkier but still history minded: the Gories, the Dwarves, the Mummies. And now this, with a fainter influence of the old masters and overlays of fragility, ambition and weirdness from all directions. Burger bands sound informed by all kinds of things: Syd Barrett, Beat Happening, the Monkees, Cat Power, Otis Redding, the Minutemen, Orange County punk bands of the ’80s. (The Shears’s father, Steven, played drums for one of those bands, Shattered Faith.)

Its basic unit, besides the cassette, has been the all-ages gig — especially at the Smell, in downtown Los Angeles — or an art space, or a skate park, or someone’s house. A few years ago, Danny Bengston from Together Pangea was a fine art major at California Institute of the Arts; he used to break into studio spaces at school during the summer and put on gigs. “That was the only place we could throw shows and not get in serious trouble,” he said. “They can’t shut down CalArts.”

Will fourth-wave garage rock change American culture in any measurable way? Perhaps not, but who knows? The musicians around Burger are interested in the past but not beholden to it: They’re fast moving, productive, interconnected, up to many things all the time. They’re too busy working, or having fun, though there may not be a meaningful difference, to second-guess themselves. The story of garage rock’s third wave was told with authority in an excellent recent book called “We Never Learn,” written by Eric Davidson of the band the New Bomb Turks. Mr. Rickard and Mr. Bohrman haven’t read it.

Mr. Rickard and Mr. Bohrman, as facilitators of this world, make nothing but sense. One way to understand them is that they have known each other since high school in Anaheim, and were in a band together, Thee Makeout Party!, spending nearly 10 years on the road in a van, meeting pretty much everyone else in the gathering fourth wave. Another way to understand them is to know that Mr. Rickard used to live above, and work in, the tack and feed store at Rancho del Rio Stables in Anaheim, which his mother managed; and that Mr. Bohrman was kicked out of high school for disseminating a zine full of nonsense, satire and scabrous reactions to school policies. A stable, a subculture, a store and samizdat. That’s pretty much the blueprint for what they’re doing now.

Also, Disneyland is in Anaheim, five miles away. Burger, finally, aspires to be a dream factory. I asked Mr. Rickard about his model for the label, now that it’s popping, now that it’s got distribution and press and bands being courted by bigger labels. “The Monkees,” he said. Well, sure, I said, but I mean in a business sense. “The Monkees,” he repeated, his eyes going googly. “We love bubble gum music. With bubble gum, cartoon bands in particular, you could manipulate and create what you want with the best studio musicians and create your own world. We’re big on creating our own world.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR22 of the New York edition with the headline: Garage Rock’s Latest Nerve Center. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe